Internet Progress

In the midst of a kind of rough work day, Tom sent me an IM yesterday with good news on the internet front. We may soon have the opportunity to pay exorbitant amounts of money for slow internet! The tower construction is finished, and there should be the possibility of accessing a T1 line soon. Nothings certain until it’s certain, but I have my fingers crossed!

There are many great things about living in a national park. Easy access high-speed internet connectivity is not one of them.

And I don’t mean to understate the benefits of living here. I’m more than spoiled by the places that I can go for a lunchtime run, or a quick hike before or after work. I love it here. But especially as a new full-time remote worker, that lack of high speed internet can also be frustrating at times.

At our house, we don’t have cell phone reception, so cellular data is out. There is no DSL or Cable service. If you want internet, the only option until recently has been satellite. On the plus side, it works. And if you think about how amazing it is that you can shoot a computer signal into space and have it bounce down and turn into and email or web page, that’s pretty amazing all by itself. On the minus side, it takes a long time to go to space and back, so the connection has a long latency. Forget video conference calls.

The bandwidth is also limited.

Thanks to this, I’ve become painfully aware of just how much an idle iPhone, in sleep mode, constantly sips data from the internet. Unless we’re careful to turn off any auto upload, “on wifi only” functions, and carefully keep phones in airplane mode when not in use, we can burn through our monthly allotment of data in just a few hours… when the phone is “off”. Checking or sending email is easy, but we have to be very selective of which videos we watch, and streaming a TV show is pretty much out of the question.

The T1 line would still be quite the turtle by today’s “real world” standards at 1.5 Mbps – slower than the satellite connection’s top speed. However, the T1 is private. No one shares it, so the speeds are consistent. It won’t slow to a crawl evenings and weekends the way the satellite connection can. However, there is almost no latency. Satellite is a wider straw, but it’s long. T1 is a little narrower, but much much shorter.

And (TA DA!) there is no bandwidth limit. No more need to ration our internet consumption!